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Tuesday, December 13, 2011

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At-Steven-and-Megan's--Savannah








Vietnam vet Randy on guitar, playing Neil Young, Johnny Cash, Van Morrison and the Beatles. Across from him, Charlie, a rather unhinged character who kept telling me to call a judge and a sherif in South Carolina, "You call them up and you tell them, Fuck you! From Charlie!

I'm going to kill them. I'm going to stand next to them, like I'm standing next to you right now, and I'm going to shoot each of them. Just one time!

I don't need 10 or 15 shots. I'll shoot each of them just one time. One shot! That's all I'll need.

I've been shot at 10 or 15 times, and I've been hit twice, and don't let them tell you, it don't hurt, cause it hurts!

I'll kill my sister too, for fucking my life up.

You call them, and you say, Fuck you! From Charlie!"

Randy started the festivity with, "Hey, it's a cracker party," and since I brought the beer and vodka, I was an honorary cracker for the evening, I guess.

Megan kept throwing up. She said she had had some bullshit pork fried rice from a Chinese takeout two days earlier.

Randy and Charlie lived in nearby tents. There were six people altogether in this wooded area near a creek.

It was nearly pitch dark inside the RV, so the light was coming from the flash on my camera.



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About Me

I was born in Vietnam in 1963, came to the U.S. in 1975, and have also lived in Italy and England. I'm the author of two collections of stories, Fake House (2000) and Blood and Soap (2004), five books of poems, All Around What Empties Out (2003), American Tatts (2005), Borderless Bodies (2006), Jam Alerts (2007) and Some Kind of Cheese Orgy (2009), and a novel, Love Like Hate (2010). My work has been anthologized in Best American Poetry 2000, 2004, 2007 and Great American Prose Poems from Poe to the Present, among many other places. I'm also the editor of the anthologies Night, Again: Contemporary Fiction from Vietnam (1996) and Three Vietnamese Poets (2001), and translator of Night, Fish and Charlie Parker, the poetry of Phan Nhien Hao (2006). Blood and Soap was chosen by the Village Voice as one of the best books of 2004. My poems, stories and political writing have been translated into Italian, Spanish, French, Dutch, German, Portuguese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic, Icelandic and Finnish, and I've been invited to read my works in London, Cambridge, Brighton, Paris, Berlin, Reykjavik, Toronto and all over the U.S. I've also published widely in Vietnamese.